---
title: "Multi-word expressions in textual inference: Much ado about nothing? — Marneffe 2009"
description: "The authors then check two paraphrase resources: 34% of the MWEs are present, but almost all with very low scores. 23 references, cited by 1 paper here."
authors: ["Marie-Catherine de Marneffe", "Sebastian Padó", "Christopher D. Manning"]
year: 2009
venue: "Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Applied Textual Inference (TextInfer)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/W09-2501/"
doi: "10.3115/1708141.1708143"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marneffe-2009-multi-word-expressions-textual-inference/"
---
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# Multi-word expressions in textual inference: Much ado about nothing?

**Authors:** [Marie-Catherine de Marneffe](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/marie-catherine-de-marneffe/), [Sebastian Padó](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/sebastian-pado/) and [Christopher D. Manning](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/christopher-d-manning/) · **Year:** 2009 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Applied Textual Inference (ACL-IJCNLP 2009) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/W09-2501](https://aclanthology.org/W09-2501/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) — summary only

[**11** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2143670291) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14 · **1** citations in our library of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read · [Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Applied Textual Inference (TextInfer)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/W09-25/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W09-2501/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W09-2501.pdf)
- [DOI 10.3115/1708141.1708143](https://doi.org/10.3115/1708141.1708143)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2143670291)

**Authors (3)**

1. [Marie-Catherine de Marneffe](https://openalex.org/A5112862689) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2241127) · h 31 · 8,612 citations · 82 works
2. [Sebastian Padó](https://openalex.org/A5003870894) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7529-6825) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1708581) · h 35 · 5,632 citations · 263 works
3. [Christopher D. Manning](https://openalex.org/A5046006076) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6155-649X) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/144783904) · h 139 · 180,101 citations · 770 works

Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, 2026-10-14; authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper asks whether multi-word expressions (MWEs) matter for recognising textual entailment (RTE). It uses the manual Microsoft Research word alignments for the RTE2 data and counts the MWEs that appear as multi-word alignment links. Only 81 (dev) and 60 (test) true MWEs occur, in 8.2% of the 1,600 sentence pairs and in 1.2% of the SURE alignment links. The authors then check two paraphrase resources: 34% of the MWEs are present, but almost all with very low scores. On the 58 test pairs that contain a true MWE, the entailment accuracy of two aligners (62% to 74%) is not worse than on the full set. The conclusion is that wrongly aligned MWEs rarely change an entailment decision.

## For Mova

- I1. Frequency audit before any MWE work: in the `en` parses of EWT test, count the multi-token units that `data/lemmas.tsv` already holds and the share of tokens they cover. Report it with `en parse-eval`. Measure: share of tokens inside listed MWEs, per treebank.
- I2. Gate for `prag` expressions: a small hand-written set of paraphrase pairs in the style of the paper's examples (take a pass on / not buy; kick the bucket / die). Check whether the expression base catches each pair before the agreer. Measure: catch rate, and the share of wrong catches.
- I3. Negative control for any MWE feature in `world`: before adding MWE handling, record the errors that trace to MWE splits. If that share is below a set threshold, the feature is not worth its cost. Measure on the existing `world` tale readers, two identical runs.

The chapter is [languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register/), with [languages/en/29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure/) only for paraphrase order. The code is `en/src/lexgen.rs` (what counts as an entry) and `prag` expressions. The RTE2 alignments and the paper's pairs are not Mova data; the pairs in I2 must be written by hand and kept held out.

## Institutions

[🎓**Stanford University** Stanford · United States 248 works · 214,804 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/stanford-university/) · [🎓**University of Stuttgart** Stuttgart · Germany 64 works · 45,339 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-stuttgart/)

Topics[Idioms & multiword expressions](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/multiword-expressions/)

## Cite

Cite as Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Sebastian Padó and Christopher D. Manning. 2009. Multi-word expressions in textual inference: Much ado about nothing?. Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Applied Textual Inference (TextInfer).

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.3115/1708141.1708143](https://doi.org/10.3115/1708141.1708143)

```bibtex
@inproceedings{marneffe2009multi,
  title = {{Multi-word expressions in textual inference: Much ado about nothing?}},
  author = {Marie-Catherine {de Marneffe}, Sebastian Padó and Christopher D. Manning},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Applied Textual Inference (TextInfer)},
  year = {2009},
  doi = {10.3115/1708141.1708143},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1708141.1708143}
}
```

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## References

23 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Colin Bannard and Chris Callison-Burch. 2005. Paraphrasing with bilingual parallel corpora. In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 597–604, Ann Arbor, MI. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bannard-2005-paraphrasing-bilingual-parallel-corpora/)
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9. Ido Dagan, Oren Glickman, and Bernardo Magnini. 2006. The PASCAL recognising textual entailment challenge. In J. Quinonero-Candela, I. Dagan, B. Magnini, and F. d’Alch Buc, editors, Machine Learning Challenges. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 3944, pages 177–190. Springer. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ido+Dagan%2C+Oren+Glickman%2C+and+Bernardo+Magnini%2E+2006%2E+The+PASCAL+recognising+textual+entailment+challenge%2E+In+J%2E+Quinonero%2DCandela%2C+I%2E+Dagan%2C+B%2E+Magnini%2C+and+F%2E+d%E2%80%99Alch+Buc%2C+editors%2C+Machine+Learning+C)
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